Description |
We are surveying the sky to find fast radio bursts (FRBs). FRBs originate from outside of our Galaxy, and are about a million times more distant than the pulsars that Parkes often studies. FRBs are one-off flashes of radio light, only recently discovered. Unlike pulsars we do not know what causes FRBs. A leading theory is that they are the bangs you get when an unstable pulsar collapses to a black hole. We will identify FRBs with Parkes and and other radio telescopes (Molonglo - which is 300 km from Parkes, the GMRT in India and the MWA in Western Australia). Using multiple telescopes together will enable us to zoom-in on the FRB region much better than ever before so that we can finally pinpoint the galaxies in which they occur, and solve this mystery once and for all. To make our discoveries in real time, i.e. 'live', we will perform very complex computing using super-fast GPUs, aka PC gaming cards.
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